


It Wakes The Seeds

by Sharksdontsleep



Category: Captain America (2011)
Genre: Alternative Universe - Civil War, American Civil War, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-21
Updated: 2011-12-21
Packaged: 2017-10-27 06:47:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,756
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/292805
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sharksdontsleep/pseuds/Sharksdontsleep
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>They still call him a sharpshooter, even if they let Bucky bring his own rifle, not a Sharp, a nine-pound breech-loader that feels like certainty when he slings it across his back.</i>
</p><p>Bucky and Steve, becoming who they become. Civil War era AU. Thanks to figletofvenice for the lovely and thoughtful beta, and to the long-suffering marycontraire for hand-holding and head pats. See end notes for (slightly) spoilery warnings. Title from Wilfred Owen's <a href="http://allpoetry.com/poem/8456361-Futility-by-Wilfred_Owen">'Futility</a>.'</p>
            </blockquote>





	It Wakes The Seeds

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Marguerite Muguet (margueritem)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/margueritem/gifts).



> Warnings for: Era-appropriate racial, homophobic, ableist attitudes and slurs; violence on par with the Captain America movie; swearing; comic!canon character injury and related anxiety/traumatic stress; made-up science. (Note: There were Civil War era electric generators called, I kid you not, ‘homopolar generators.’ No pun intended.) Also, Civil War refers to the American Civil War, not the Marvel Civil War.
> 
> Canon: Blend of Captain America (2011) with some backstory taken from Marvel 616.

They still call him a sharpshooter, even if they let Bucky bring his own rifle, not a Sharp, a nine-pound breech-loader that feels like certainty when he slings it across his back. It’s one of the two things that remains of his father - the gun and the debt, 10 dollars in the hole to their rat of a landlord, and sinking deeper.

Bucky’s father had marched off to war and hadn’t marched home. Killed, perhaps, cannon-fodder for Mexican artillery, or simply had taken a look at his options - a wife getting fatter by the year, a kid who he couldn’t keep in shoes on one side, and the vast expanse of the West on the other - and chosen the logical option.

Bucky couldn’t blame him, really, now that he’s marching off to war too. Well, he and Steve are marching off to war, and ain’t that a hoot, Steve with a pack that weighs more than he does, Steve who’ll be dead from dysentery if the typhoid doesn’t get him first.

They take Bucky ‘cause he hits ten targets in ten minutes. They take Steve ‘cause Bucky asks.

“Waste of shoe-leather and lead,” Colonel Phillips mutters, before signing his papers.

But in the quiet of the Maryland wilderness, Steve’s smallness is his strength. Scout-snipers, two-man teams aimed at locating the Confederate troops, reporting back, killing as necessary.

Steve moves like a ghost, slim enough that he can shimmy onto the high branches of trees, branches that would snap under Bucky’s weight.

“Large encampment, a mile off, as the crow,” Steve says, climbing down. “Not bothering to hide their fires. Patrols.”

Bucky offers a hand, which Steve takes, then levers himself off the tree into Bucky’s arms. It’s not hard to take his weight, skinny as he is, though the war has made him harder, sharper, more muscular than he was.

Patrols mean they’re in the shit, now, even if the only noises are hoot owls and spring peepers. Steve’s face and hair are blackened with coal tar paints, mud, sweat from the exertion of crawling around in trees tracing lines through it like tear tracks.

“Let’s go,” Steve says, no louder than a breath, then takes off into the trees, doesn’t look back, knows that Bucky will follow him.

They’re half a mile off from their camp, maybe a bit more, and have to recross a small creek, 20 feet from bank-to-bank. It’s harder now that the moon’s gone behind a cloud, the stars far-off dots in the sky. There’s no quiet way to do this.

Steve goes first, nimble over rocks, though there are sloshing noises as his boots rearrange the creek-bed. He slips, catches himself, laughs a little.

That’s when the first bullet whizzes by Bucky’s head.

“Take cover!” he yells, because he knows they’ve been spotted. He splashes across the creek, grabs Steve by his waist, by the too-heavy pack on his back, by the rifle Steve never uses, and hauls him across the creek, up the small rise of the bank, over, then presses him flat, flat against the ground.

More shots fire, hit dirt, hit rocks, one sends up sparks.

Most soldiers couldn’t hit the broad side of a bull with a bass fiddle, as the saying goes. The reb shooting at them is no exception.

Bucky has his rifle, accepts the linen cartridge from Steve, whose hands shake, ever so slightly. Fear, possibly, but more likely the rush of battle, knowing Steve. Bucky has to crawl up the rise, looks for the muzzle flash of the repeater that’s aiming for them, sights it once, twice, then cocks the hammer, exhales, squeezes the trigger before drawing another breath.

A miss, fuck, he loads again. Steve is up the bank now, beside him, a pair of binoculars against his face. The moon’s back out, and it washes Steve and the creek in its light, illuminates the far bank.

Steve lies next to Bucky, crosses his leg across Bucky’s, shin against Bucky’s knee, evens his breathing. “One hundred yards, give or take,” Steve says, lips next to Bucky’s ear. “Wind. Slight.”

“Yeah,” Bucky says. He reloads, fires again, and there’s the crack of the shot, the curse of a man being hit, the wet thump of his body hitting the ground. “Got him.”

They lie like that, together, for a moment. They’ll need to move soon; there will be other patrols. Whoever was patrolling with the shot reb must have taken off, maybe fleeing, maybe getting reinforcements.

It’s a cool night, but Bucky’s sweating, feels it pool at the base of his spine, bead between his nose and upper lip. Steve’s eyes look large in his thin face, almost glowing against the dark paint on his skin. His hair, already too long, is hanging down across his forehead.

Bucky reaches a hand to push it back, to check Steve for signs of panic, bruising, though Steve’s breathing is slow and steady, not rattled by the terrible coughs he got before.

That’s when they hear the damned reb singing.

O how shall I the goodness tell,  
Father, which thou to me hast showed?  
That I, a child of wrath and hell,  
I should be called a child of God.

It’s a hymn, one Bucky sang in church, when his mother was sober enough to drag him. Steve’s parents were Catholic, before his mother had succumbed to consumption, his father to the shrapnel he took in the Mexican War. But he’d gone with Bucky often enough to learn the words, the tune, sings it now, just under his breath, reflexively, along with the dying rebel.

“Shhh...” Bucky says, though there’s no way any of the patrols will hear him over the flow of the creek, the gurgle of the dying man on the opposite bank.

Steve looks at him, face so close Bucky can smell the sourness of his breath, and keeps singing.

They tromp back to camp, boots wet with water from the creek. Steve has a gash on his arm he must have gotten when Bucky pulled him up the bank, lets Nurse Carter coo over him, rolling it in white bandages.

They sleep in their two-man tent, burrowed under wet wool blankets, backs suspended a few sparing inches off the ground on canvas cots pushed together for warmth. Steve flops beside him, crawls under the blankets, still in his mud-stained uniform and holey socks.

“Cold feet,” Bucky murmurs.

“Yeah,” Steve says. “You love ‘em.”

“Sure, sure,” Bucky says, and falls asleep to the sound of Steve’s slow snoring.

The morning brings hot mush and chicory for breakfast, and a German doctor here to poke and prod them.

“Doc’s here to feel you ladies up,” the Colonel growls. He spits a wad of tobacco at the ground, misses Bucky’s boots by inches. “Let him.”

The Doc’s Prussian, not German, speaks his English with the soft inflection of an accent, not too different than the Krauts that moved into his area in Brooklyn a few years ago.

He doesn’t have much to say to Bucky, taps his joints with a wooden mallet, says something about establishing a baseline for new-rology or some such, mutters about nerve endings and hands Bucky back his shirt.

The doctor keeps Steve for an hour.

“What’d he want?” Bucky asks, when Steve finds him smoking, watching the others taking practice shots at cans, at leaves off trees, at someone’s hat that’s been swiped and put on a distant fencepost.

Bucky exhales his stream of smoke away from Steve, doesn’t like how Steve coughs when he’s around smoke.

“I’m being reassigned,” Steve says.

“Damn it,” Bucky says, takes a long draw on his cigarette. It’s damp, a little bent. “You’re as good as any of these assholes.”

Jones hits the hat right in the center, enough to knock it off the post, from 200 yards away, whoops and goes to get whatever prize he’s earned from besting Dum Dum.

“Well, you’re good at the scouting,” Bucky says. “What good’ll you be on the front lines, anyhow? You can barely carry that rifle of yours.”

When Bucky looks up, Steve’s face is scrunched like Bucky just socked him in the stomach.

“If that’s how you feel, maybe it’s better that I’m going,” he says, turns and walks off with as much clip in his step as he can manage.

“Wait, Steve, I just meant - ” Bucky says, but then Captain Sawyer is barking at them to drop their rocks and grab their socks, because they're marching out.

Bucky packs both his and Steve’s things, rolls up the tent, the blankets, grabs one of Steve’s shirts and shoves it in his own pack for reasons he doesn’t stop long enough to examine. Steve is gone to where-ever he’s going, and they march all day, make camp in another set of woods, in another place in Maryland, as another set of generals decides who they’re going to kill and when.

It’s two years before he sees Steve again.

 

 

 

 

“Don’t fucking kill them!” Bucky yells.

The rebs have him, have him and Morita and Jones, held a knife to Jones’ throat until he backed into what looks like a jail cell. Morita had been harder to subdue. He’s lying on the floor of the cell, unconscious, though breathing steadily.

Bucky’s tied to something with rope so tight he can’t feel his hands.

It was Phillips' fault, of course, sending Morita and Jones into Confederate territory.

Jones’ parents were free-born, his grandparents free-born, had done his coursework at Oberlin in French literature of all things. Not that it matters below the Mason-Dixon line. Hell, it didn't matter in Bucky's neighborhood in Brooklyn.

Morita was white in Georgia, colored in California, Nisei either way, and fucked right now.

“Looks like we got a darky-lover and a chink-lover here. You an invert, too, kid?” one of the rebs says.

“Why?” Bucky says. “You asking me to be your beau? Got your dress all picked out for the cotillion?”

He’s slapped, once, hard, across the face, with a gloved hand that feels like iron. He tastes blood. One of his teeth loosens in his jaw.

“Enough!” the man who slapped him says, the commanding officer, clearly. He’s a lieutenant colonel, if Bucky’s reading his insignia correctly, pale like a ghost where his wrists peak from his brown uniform sleeves, paler than any man who’s spent time in the field has the right to be. His face is mostly covered, veiled almost, in a thin muslin cloth, but Bucky can see a hideous redness around his eyes, like a severe burn, skin cracked and oozing.

“Let them go!” Bucky says, again. His tooth, or at least part of one, is definitely loose, and his spits, a wad of saliva and blood and a chunk of molar. Still, it’s better than swallowing it, only to retch it up on himself.

The colonel crouches down, puts his charred face very near Bucky’s. Bucky can smell his breath and it makes him shudder. His breath smells like mint, smells clean, but there’s something else there too, something sinister, the undercurrent of death and rot.

His voice is soft, dangerous, when he speaks. “These men are worthless to me. Corruptions of the ideal man. God’s forgotten experiments,” he says. “They are worthless to me, but not, I think, to you.”

Bucky smiles, mirthless, can feel the blood in his teeth.

“Do what you want to me,” he says. “Just don’t touch a hair on their ‘worthless’ heads.”

“It seems, then, we have a deal, Sergeant.”

Jones protests, flings himself against the bars of his cell, gets a thump from a Confederate guard as payment.

Bucky’s tossed into some kind of holding area, really no more than a locked cellar. It gets chilly as day becomes night, but he’s slept in worse. They don’t give him a pot to piss in, so he goes in the corner, whistles as he finally shows the Confederacy what he thinks of it.

Hard-tack gets thrown down the stairs in the morning, a canteen of water. It must be laced with something, laudanum or one of those other new-fangled knock-outs, because when he comes to, he’s strapped to a bed by leather cuffs, a man in a white coat peering down at him.

“Damn,” Bucky says.

“Indeed,” the man says, and jabs Bucky in his bruised ribs with a syringe.

“Goddamn,” Bucky says. His lips are cracked and he feels blood welling up; his shoulders ache. “How long?”

“You have been here a week, Sergeant Barnes,” the man says. “We have had the pleasure of this conversation several times. I look forward to it again.”

Bucky feels ripples at the edges of his vision, a blur of motion as the doctor does something with a piece of sparking equipment. He struggles against his bonds for a second, and then relents, feels like he entering the deepest part of sleep, like he’s wrapped in a wool blanket. He expects to hurt, doesn’t, can’t quite feel his fingers or the tips of his toes. He should be worried, he thinks, before he’s out again.

Bucky comes around again, hears the whir of some kind of disk, an electrical arc like lightening. He sees the flash of a saw against his shoulder, doesn’t feel its teeth.

He dreams, or he thinks he dreams, that he is on fire.

Fire consumes his arm - his gun arm. Somehow, he’s standing at the edge of the river. It’s Brooklyn in August, when all the grass is dry and scorched, when it’s too much effort to do anything but go swimming and sleep away the afternoon.

Steve is there, of course, running ahead of him, oblivious to the fact that Bucky is on fire, diving into the river, skinny as a stick, laughing. He goes in the water without much of a splash, doesn’t surface.

Bucky’s chest gets tight. The sun sinks, too rapid, like an eye blinking; the sky darkens. Time must have passed, the moon is a sliver, no light, and Steve has been under only for a second but also hours.

Bucky tries to say his name, tries to yell it, to tell him to come back - it’s not safe! - but his throat gives a dry click, can’t seem to make any sound.

Bucky takes a gulp of air, dives, swims, his arm still ablaze, even in the water. He uses its light as he swims, deeper and deeper, into the dark of the river. Fish pass, strange things with glowing bits on their heads like fireflies, mirrors on their sides catching distorted reflections. His lungs begin to burn, his head is woozy, oh, he won’t make it and then -

Steve is there, at the bottom, lying like a corpse, like he’s sleeping, face mild. His body flickers somehow, Steve, fragile and small, casting long shadows in the light of Bucky’s fire.

Bucky reaches out with his flaming hand, reaches to push Steve’s hair out of his eyes, to shake him awake, to save him.

Steve slits his eyes open at Bucky’s touch, smiles, expression fond, says something that’s lost in the rush of the water.

And then Steve’s expression turns fearful - he’s screaming, inhaling water, eyes huge.

Bucky turns to see what’s coming at them, sees only a dark cloud in the water, like smoke, like blood. Water fills his mouth, his lungs, fills him with this strange unknowable darkness and -

 

 

 

 

When he wakes up, for real this time, his arm is gone, and Steve - a bigger, stronger version of him - is standing over him, cupping Bucky’s face in his hands.

“Steve,” he says. His tongue feels thick in his mouth; his head feels like it’s been packed with cotton.

“Can you walk?” Steve says.

“Didn’t take my leg, did they?” Bucky says, aiming for a joke, though the look on Steve’s face says he’s missed. “Yeah,” he says. “I’ll try.”

Steve, the big version of him, taller than Bucky and twice as wide in the shoulders, half-carries him out, slings Bucky’s remaining arm over his shoulder, has a pistol in his hand and another in a thigh holster, a large shield across his back, painted like a target.

“Gimme a gun,” Bucky whispers. “I can shoot.”

“You can barely stand,” Steve says.

“Like I said, I can shoot.”

“Later,” Steve says. “Later.”

There’s gunfire, pistol shots, the sound of fighting. Something in the lab has caught fire, and the hallway fills with greasy smoke. Steve’s breathing, Bucky thinks, a little absurdly, and then Steve is scooping him up, and they’re running, out out out into the too-bright of day.

 

 

 

 

His arm is gone, but the wound’s been cauterized, wrapped in clean bandages, none of the creeping signs of gangrene or blood poisoning. It says something about the drugs they gave him that he doesn’t remember them taking it, exactly, only waking without it, wants to wiggle the trigger finger that doesn’t exist any more, feels pains in places he doesn’t _fucking_ have.

All in all, Bucky thinks he’s being surprisingly reasonable about the whole thing.

“The Confederates wanted to see the effects of anesthesia and if it would work for amputations, so they _took my arm_ ,” he says. “And they were gonna do worse to Jones and Morita, if you didn’t spring us.”

Steve doesn’t shrug exactly, but he does sit beside Bucky, takes Bucky’s remaining hand, runs his finger over one of the calluses on his thumb, the one he has from loading his rifle.

“And somehow, you got really fucking big in this whole process.”

“I told you, Buck - lots of stuff I can’t really explain, but, yeah.”

“Great, so you’re Frankenstein’s monster and I’m - ”

“Hey,” Steve says. He’s still holding Bucky’s hand in his, examining it as if he’s expecting that one to disappear too.

Bucky jerks it away.

Steve sighs. “They’re getting you a new arm. At least, I think. Something about wiring it into your nerves. That’s what the doctor was who came and did, you know” - he gestures to himself - “ _this_ , was. A neurologist.”

“So, I get a fancy new arm. You got a fancy new body. We were killing rebs just fine before, you know,” Bucky says.

“No,” Steve says, and his voice hasn’t changed, but he’s able to hit a deeper tone now, his firmness and determination less farcical now that he’s big. " _You_ were killing rebs just fine. I was happy just to be invited. I know you had to plead with Phillips and Sawyer just to let me tag along. The other guys made fun of - they said you’d brought your kid brother to war, if they were feeling nice, or your girl, maybe, if they weren’t.”

Steve’s worked up now, face red, color high on his cheeks the way he’d get when he was fighting or when Bucky made him jump off the high rocks into the river. He’s big, so much bigger than he ways, looming, arms tensing, a vein Bucky never knew he’d had throbbing in his forehead.

“Steve -” Bucky says. “Jesus. I-”

Steve holds up a hand.

Bucky can’t even pretend that he didn’t know, that he didn’t hear James and Morita and Dum Dum and Cohen and the Scottish fellow who just showed up one day knowing everything there was about Whitmore rifles and ladies’ underthings.

Bucky doesn’t insult Steve that way, can’t.

“Steve,” he says. “This is just all so … new,” he finishes lamely. Doesn’t know what else there is to say.

“For me too, buddy,” Steve says. “I keep hitting my head on doorways.”

And that was Steve, all over, and Bucky can’t help the laugh that hits him, doubling over, clutching his stomach with his remaining arm. It’s not even that funny, but the gobsmacked look on Steve’s face is too much, and Bucky laughs again, tears pricking his eyes, gasping for breath like he’s the one with the shitty lungs. He guesses he is now.

Steve smiles, a small thing, then he’s laughing, and that’s how Morita finds them, gripping each other, Steve pounding Bucky on the back so hard it hurts.

They bunk together. Having one arm makes stupid things difficult. Bucky can barely button his own pants, and there’s a fumbled exchange he never wants to have again - Steve holding his trousers up, while Bucky attempts the buttons - that he knows he’ll have to have every time he needs to take a piss.

Bucky stays in his pants, his shirt, ditches his green sharpshooter jacket.

Steve strips to his skivvies, mumbles something about being too hot now, always, crawls under the blankets and turns away from Bucky.

Bucky spends a long time propped up - he’d slept for days, weeks, maybe, at the lab - watching Steve. One of the boys had left a bottle of something foul-smelling. Bucky sips at it, watching the flames burn in the gas lamps, winces. The liquor burbles in his stomach, but leaves him warm.

Steve sleeps like he’s always slept, light snores, tucked in on himself, face slack. He drools a little.

“So they made me a crip,” Bucky says, softly, so as not to wake Steve. “And they made you a killer. Huh.”

He must sleep, because when he wakes up, Steve is leaning over him, has him by the shoulders, shakes him.

“You were screaming,” Steve says, voice low.

Bucky’s throat feels hoarse, like maybe he was at it for a while, like Steve’s been hoping he’d yell himself awake or something. “Sorry,” he says, “Sorry for waking you.”

“It’s OK,” Steve says, and runs his hand down the side of Bucky’s face, under the line of his jaw, and it’s such an inversion of what they used to do, of how Bucky used to wake Steve, to apply plasters to Steve wounds, to rub his bruises so they won’t show black and blue, that Bucky just _aches_ with it, aches in his stomach, across the span of his shoulders, aches in the arm he doesn’t have any more.

The lamps have gone out, but there’s still a candle, burning low.

Bucky reaches up with his arm, slides it up Steve’s back, against the nape of his neck, watches Steve flush.

“I -” Steve begins, and then Bucky kisses him, once, with teeth, a little, because he wants to, and never has, and because Steve’s never been as fragile as he looks.

Steve kisses like he’s never done it before, mouth a bit too open, sloppy. Bucky uses the slight leverage from his arm, sits them up so that Steve is lying against him, though Steve still supports most of his own weight.

“C’mon,” Bucky says, like Steve needs to catch up, and kisses him again.

Steve’s lips are soft; his mouth fuzzy with sleep. He’s got the beginning of a beard, stubble rough, rubs at Bucky’s cheek. He’s not sure what to do with his hands, Bucky can tell. Bucky guides them to his shoulders, settles them there.

They kiss like that, Steve getting better at it - more exploratory, more assertive - until Bucky’s lightheaded, from the kissing and the liquor and the food he’d retched up earlier and from seeing Steve after all this time, from the isolation of this small room and the way Steve still _smells_ the same, even in his oversized new body.

It must have the same effect on Steve, because he pulls off, takes a breath like he’s been running, flops next to Bucky, close, on the narrow bed. He skims his hands up Bucky’s side, just under the hem of his shirt, at the place where his skin stretches thin over his hipbone.

Bucky shudders.

Steve withdraws his hand like he’s been burned.

“No, it’s just -” Bucky says, reaching for Steve’s hand, replacing it on his stomach. Bucky puts his hand on top of Steve’s, his fingers in the dips between Steve’s knuckles. “I -”

“Yeah,” Steve says.

They lie like that, together, for a long while.

“I found your pack, you know,” Steve says. “When we found you.”

“Oh,” Bucky says.

“It had my shirt,” Steve says, like that explains everything.

“I took it,” Bucky says. “When you left. I … I don’t know why.”

Steve looks at Bucky, looks at their hands intertwined, and smiles. “You’re pretty thick, Buck, if you haven’t figured it out by now.”

“I might have some kind of clue,” Bucky says.

“First time for everything.”

Bucky falls asleep again, to the sound of Steve breathing beside him.

 

 

 

 

“We’re going to have to reopen the wound,” Nurse - no, _Agent_ \- Carter says. She looks different out of her nurse uniform, taller somehow. She’s dressed similarly, no flounces, sleeves pushed up, exposing tanned forearms, capable-looking hands.

Bucky shrugs. “I figured, when Steve said something about wiring the arm. What exactly does that mean?” They have him on a bed, bound loosely - to keep him from thrashing in case the anesthesia wears off mid-surgery. Bucky’s not sure what he’d like less - to wake up being operated on or to not wake up at all.

“Do you want the short explanation or the one that Mr. Stark will give you?”

“Mr. Stark?” Bucky asks, but perhaps wishes he hasn’t.

A man who must be Mr. Stark enters, talking a mile a minute, leering a bit at Agent Carter, fiddling with the equipment that looks like a mixture of surgical tools and the back a mechanic’s shop, wiping what must be breakfast out of his mustache. He’s in civilian clothes, shirtsleeves rolled, a smear of grease across one arm.

“Let’s get you wired up, then,” Mr. Stark says.

“About that -” Bucky says.

“New arm, metal, strong metal,” he says, like that explains everything. “Let me know if you want to change the color scheme.”

“I want to -” he says, and then Mr. Stark is going for a bottle, and it smells like whatever they used to keep him knocked out when he was at the lab, and he doesn’t remember pulling at the straps, until he hears the bones in his wrist start to protest and he must be yelling or something, because Steve is there in the next minute, unbuckling the straps, voice low like he’s calming a spooked animal.

Steve guides him carefully to a chair, sits on the operating bed next to Bucky, which groans under his weight. Another thing Bucky’s sure he’ll never get used to.

Steve’s voice isn’t angry when he says, “Explain it again, but slowly. And without going for the anesthesia,” to Agent Carter. Instead, it’s steady, even.

“Howard,” she says, like that explains everything. “He isn’t the most - he has the bedside manner of an engineer. Because he’s an engineer.”

“Well, I ain’t a piece of artillery,” Bucky says. “Not yet, anyhow.”

“They’re wiring you,” Agent Carter says. “Howard built an arm that will … interface with your nervous system, but will respond when you want it to.”

“I’ll be able to shoot?” Bucky says.

“You will _be_ the weapon, Sergeant Barnes,” she says.

”Oh,” he says. Then, after a minute, “Will it hurt?”

“Yes,” Carter says. “I expect it will.”

“Thank you,” Steve says. “Peggy. Thank you.”

“Of course,” Peggy says.

 

 

 

 

When Bucky wakes up, Steve is holding his hand, his _real_ one. There’s metal attached to one of his shoulders, like some kind of Howitzer strapped to his body. It’s _part_ of him, now, metal like armor. He thinks about wiggling his fingers, watches the metal respond. He can hear clicks as he does it. Strange, he thinks, to see his thoughts move a machine.

“How long?” he croaks.

Steve makes an honest-to-god clucking noise that Bucky’d tease him for any day but this one, and brings a cool wet cloth to Bucky’s lips. It’s well-water, foul-tasting, sulfurous, wonderful. “Not long,” he says. “A few hours.”

“I’m … is this how you felt?” he asks. “Like you didn’t belong to _you_ any more.”

“Yeah,” Steve says, shrugging. “It takes some getting used to.”

Bucky’s up and moving in the next few hours; ‘recovery’ apparently means sipping laudanum while Steve and Peggy drink gin. Steve can’t get drunk, apparently; Peggy seems to share Steve’s tolerance except that her laughs come a little bit easier.

“What’s the Crown doing on this side of the fight, anyway?” Bucky asks. “Thought you all needed cotton from the rebs.”

“It has always been in her Majesty's nature to hedge her bets, as it were,” Peggy says.

“So here you are,” Bucky says.

“Here I am,” Peggy smiles. “Do lay off the laudanum a bit, darling. I don’t want your sutures bleeding.”

“‘Darling’?” Bucky says. “I could get used to this.”

Peggy doesn’t blush, but Steve does, just a little. “I’ll see to him, Peggy. Don’t worry.”

“Between the two of you, I’ll been hen-pecked to death before the Grays even get a shot off,” Bucky says.

“Hardly,” Peggy says, but tsks over his bandaging before getting up to head to her rooms for the evening. “Mission soon, gentlemen. The Colonel’s getting restless.”

“We’ll be right as rain tomorrow,” Bucky says. “Won’t we, Steve?”

“Your arm -” Peggy says, but stops herself. “Just don’t strain it. We don’t know what it’s capable of, yet.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Bucky mock salutes, with his metal arm.

Peggy shuts the door behind her, carefully, as if the sound could wake a company of sleeping soldiers.

Bucky’s half-asleep from the laudanum, lets Steve manhandle him into bed. Steve frowns as he runs a hand over Bucky’s face.

“See something you like?” Bucky says, voice slurred.

“Sergeant, you could use a shave.”

“Guess you’ll have to do that, then,” Bucky says. “Don’t trust my hands, yet. Trust yours.”

Steve does, in the morning. Heats a bowl of water, brings in shaving soap, aligns the blade of a razor against a leather strap.

“That Agent Carter is some lady,” Bucky says, as Steve lathers soap on Bucky’s neck.

“Sure,” Steve says, quizzically. He tucks a towel carefully around Bucky’s shoulders. Bucky’s shirtless, doesn’t want to spend the day with damp clothes.

“She seems to like you,” Bucky says.

Steve motions for him to tilt his head up, draws the blade of the razor down, gentle, against the grain of the hair. He dunks the blade briefly in the bowl of water, repeats.

“Peggy’s nice,” Steve says, after a few minutes. “She was good to talk to after … she worries about us, I think. The snipers. How we’re holding up. Mentally.” He holds the blade under Bucky’s jaw, shaves right where Bucky can feel his pulse pick up. “She says there’s a lot of the guys suffering from - it’s called ‘soldier’s heart’ - exhaustion. All the same.”

“How are we holding up?” Bucky says. “Mentally?”

“You tell me, Buck,” Steve says. He says it lightly, teasing, but Bucky can hear the catch in his voice.

“If we survive the war -”

“When, you mean,” Steve says.

“Sure. When we survive, you think about going overseas? England, maybe.”

“I was thinking of going back to Brooklyn. I miss the old place, you know. Going swimming in the river, getting beaten up by the neighborhood bullies. Though that’s probably less likely.” Steve guides the blade under Bucky’s chin, hands steady, now, always steady. “That’s the last of it.”

“Don’t see you as cut out for the quiet life, Steve,” Bucky says.

“How could my life be quiet,” Steve says. “With you around?”

 

 

 

 

A week later, they’re fed biscuits with honey and ham for breakfast, the surest sign they’ll be on a mission soon.

“Don’t feed soldiers like this unless they expect to kill us,” Morita says, loading his plate with another slice of ham.

“I want my last meal to be whiskey served by the finest dancing ladies of New York City.” booms Dum Dum. “Er, apologies, ma’am.”

Peggy shrugs. “Americans,” she says. “You think you have a monopoly on bawdiness the same way you have a monopoly on arrogance.”

“Here, here,” Pinkerton says, and toasts Peggy with a metal cup of tea. She clangs her own cup against it, and they drink.

Sure enough, Phillips comes in after they’re mostly done. It’s a scout-sniper mission, fairly standard. The rebs have snipers now, too, so they’ll have to get to high-ground first.

The plan is simple: Pick off the field commanders too stupid not to wear their medals into battle, then the ones too stupid not to be saluted, then the ones too stupid not to flee once gunshots start.

This, Phillips says, will be enough of a distraction so that a second team - Jones, Morita, Pinkerton, a few others - can assault the camp, freeing a Union major and whatever remains of his company.

Steve and Bucky will be the advance team, taking out whatever rebs are patrolling the area, and establishing high ground, drawing enemy fire.

“You’ll have to be more than 900 yards out,” Phillips says. “The rebs’ Whitlocks are inaccurate beyond 800. Of course this means you’ll have to be accurate.”

“Will do, Colonel,” Bucky says, with a confidence he’s not sure he feels entirely.

 

 

 

 

The high ground is apparently a nearly-vertical hike up to a granite outcropping. It’s a hundred feet up, at least, provides a wide overlook of the Confederate camp. A scraggle of trees protects their flank, but the outcrop itself is barren and slick. No sign of patrols, though that doesn’t mean much. Steve climbs like he’d been born a spider, feet almost dancing up the side of the rock-face.

Bucky’s new arm can take his bodyweight and then some. Still, he’s sucking wind by the time they reached their objective point.

“Never did like heights,” he says, when he has his breath back.

“Could have fooled me,” Steve says. “Making me jump into the river from those rocks. Thought I was done for.”

“Shhhhh... Bucky says. They’re lying prone, Bucky’s rifle out, scope on it. The recoil of the gun - combined with the scope Stark made for him - will be enough to leave his face bruised. His aim with it is still better than with the arm, which has a tendency to jerk to the right when firing in practice. Still, it can do some damage at close range.

Steve’s beside him. His gun’s out, at least, has a sidearm strapped in a thigh-holster.

“You ready?” Bucky asks.

“I’ve killed before,” Steve says, voice tight.

“Like this?”

“No,” Steve admits. “Got a reb who was trying to stab me with a bayonet. Twisted it around on him. Injured a few others. Shot over their heads - cover. Mostly did scout-and-rescue stuff. Freed prisoners. A few incursions into Virginia, north Georgia. Aided the slaves - freedmen, I guess - already leaving.”

“God, Steve,” Bucky says. “Someday, you’ll tell me the secret of how you can stay so … you in all this.”

“Doesn’t make me less culpable,” Steve says. “Just because I didn’t pull the trigger. Killed that reb sure as you did the day before you left - ”

“ _I_ left?” Bucky says. At this he actually relaxes his grip on his rifle, turns to face Steve, who’s looking at him with an expression of disbelief. “OK, Steve. OK.”

“Well, I found you, anyway. So there’s that.”

Bucky presses his lips together, scopes the area, dotted with Confederate tents. The goddamn rebs were getting smarter. Their field commanders didn’t wear big metal targets on their chests anymore. Guess they’d given up pomp for not getting shot. He’d have to pick off a few, take his bets at how they were carrying themselves, how their men approached them.

One clump of soldiers was drinking, passing a flask around. No officers there, probably, or maybe some field lieutenant not worth the lead.

Another group, this time over a camp table, examining something, possibly a map. One was gesturing to the others, perhaps the commanding officer, or a reporting scout or cavalryman, his back facing Bucky and Steve.

Bucky aligns his rifle, steadies his breathing, feels for the trigger with his new hand. It’s an odd sensation - he can feel the metal of the trigger, cool, still, no body heat to warm it.

“700 yards, 3’o’clock. At the camp table. About to ruin his briefing,” Bucky says.

“Wind,” Steve murmurs. There was rustling of it in the trees, the slight whistle of birdsong.

Bucky aims, fires the shot, feels the punch of the scope against his face. Loads, repeats, takes out another man who was at the table, another officer, or some unlucky corporal. He loads, zips another, this one in the leg, watches him fall, get trampled by his fellow soldiers fleeing.

There’s yelling, general confusion at the camp below.

Steve pulls a blanket over Bucky and himself, something sort of gray and mottled like granite, concealing their position further. They need to fire more shots, perhaps, or let the rebs distract themselves. Bucky hopes they’ll be too busy taking cover and caring for the wounded to ascertain their position.

The blanket may be good for maintaining cover, but it narrows Bucky’s vision to what he can see through his scope and Steve. Steve is beside him, too close, the way they used to sleep, before-

That’s when he hears the crack of gunfire. Some patrolling reb must have made them, because there are shots, and shouting about ‘Yankee sniper bastards,’ and Steve is kicking off the blanket and reaching for his sidearm.

“Get down,” he yells, and Bucky’s rifle feels absurd when the enemy is too close to be seen through a scope, and he’s scrambling back on the jut of rock to take cover. Steve has one of the rebs down in a flash, hits the other with the handle of his pistol, watches him go sprawling.

They’re young, skinny as the rails Sherman’s been tying around trees, look surprised and underfed.

“Sent kids up here,” Steve says. “Jesus. Next, I’ll be fighting old men.”

Another soldier comes, older than the others, screams as he tries to take their position. Steve uses the soldier’s momentum, sidesteps him, doesn’t lay a hand on him as the man manages to run himself to the edge of the outcrop. He skids, pinwheels his arms, and drops over. It’d be funny if not for the wet smack that Bucky hears. Bucky imagines a red smear down the side of the rock, doesn’t look.

There are still shots being fired; someone has a repeater, probably.

“Steve, get the fuck down.” Bucky goes to one knee, doesn’t even reach for his rifle, just aims his new arm. He closes his eyes, briefly, just for a second, to listen for the location of the shots. Not far, clearly, sound echoing against the rock, distorted by the trees and the screams of the men below.

Something in the arm begins whirring - it’s a strange, mechanical noise, still disconcerting to hear coming from something attached to his own body. He can feel it, at once immediate, but somehow detached, a tingling like being pricked with needles, not quite pain.

There’s a clanging sound, several more clicks and then his arm _fires_ , emitting some kind of blast like a Napolean gun, rattling his teeth with the recoil.

He opens his eyes, exhales, and hears the thump of someone falling, a loud curse -

So he’s not expecting to get shot in the back. It sends him sprawling. He hits his jaw against the rock, clocks his head, then feels a crunch as goes down on one side, unprotected. His nose starts to bleed, and there’s a moment where he can’t draw breath.

One of his lungs feel like somone’s popped it with a pin. He’s _down_. There’s wetness on his shirtfront, blood, for sure, from his nose or from the bullet. Damn, if that’s the exit wound, he’s more than fucked, he’s a ghost already.

The cliff face is slippery. It had rained, some time recent. Bucky lurches to his feet, drops to a bear-crawl when he finds he can’t stand. His hands slide against the rock.

He’s flailing, boots failing to find purchase, and the edge of the cliff is right there. He falls backwards, scrambling, hands stupid against the smooth rock. His fingers are useless; his metal arm an anchor dragging him down.

He can’t stop, fumbles, thinks, “Fuck, what a stupid way to go,” thinks, “Fuck, what a stupid last thought,” thinks “Fuck, Steve,” and realizes that there’s no way he’s gonna make it, that he’s done for. His gun - maybe he can get a shot off, something sudden and inelegant, at least buy Steve some time before -

His head slams against the rock. His hold on his rifle slips. He hears it clatter against the rock, lost.

Steve’s there, huge, reaching a hand. Bucky stretches his arm, grips, and the readjustment in his position forces him against the rock, knocks the air from his chest.

“C’mon, Buck,” Steve says. “Reach.”

“M’trying,” Bucky says, but it sounds wrong, like he’s talking under water.

Someone’s shooting at the cliff, at where Bucky hangs, over the edge, though their aim is off and they hit well below of him, though the next shot is closer.

He’s slipping from Steve’s grasp, hand wet with sweat and blood and rainwater. He’s done, why can’t Steve see that, save himself.

Another shot hits, right below his feet, and Steve jerks his arm, trying to avoid it, probably, has the side effect of bashing Bucky against the rocks.

Bucky bites his tongue, mouth full of blood, sees spots on his vision, and the last thing he hears is Steve swear.

 

 

 

 

It’s quieter than it should be.

There’s a sound like water rushing past his ears.

“We going swimming?” he says, bewildered, tongue thick. “Never did like the high rocks.”

There’s stone under him, Steve covering his body, hell on his ribs. Sky above him, light dazzling.

He’s wrapped in the gray blanket, though there’s a dark stain spreading across it for some reason. Steve must have pulled him up. They’re in a little dip between two rises in the cliff, Bucky cradled in the rock, Steve across him.

“Bucky,” Steve says, arranging the blanket on Bucky’s chest, pressing. “Stay with me, buddy.”

“Always with you,” Bucky says, and, shit, he’s gurgling blood.

Steve presses a rough kiss to his forehead, mouth comes away red.

“Always,” Steve says.

“Did you mean what you said?” Bucky asks. “About after. The quiet life.”

“Not too quiet,” Steve says. “You better not leave me again.”

“Not leaving,” Bucky says, but it sounds weak. “I -”

“You boys picked a hell of a spot for an ambush,” says a loud, British voice behind them. A loud British _female_ voice. “None of the other men could even make it up here fast enough.”

Bucky cracks an eye, sees Peggy standing over them, repeater in hand, sidearm at her thigh, looking thoroughly annoyed at their being stupid enough to get shot at.

“Cover me, Steve,” she says, and drops, makes quick work of Bucky’s shirt. “Two or three cracked ribs, possible punctured lung. A bullet in his shoulder. Bloody nose, broken. He’s concussed, for certain. Can you carry him? I’ll secure the cliff, come down after.”

“Yes,” Steve says, voice shaking. Bucky passes out half-way down the cliff, against the solid pressure of Steve’s chest.

 

 

 

 

“We have to stop meeting like this,” Steve says, when Bucky opens his eyes.

“Funny,” Bucky says. He feels his lips crack. Steve’s there, holds up a glass of water, dribbles some gently across Bucky’s mouth.

“You took one in the shoulder. The arm stopped it from penetrating, but the impact was bad enough that your lung nearly gave out.”

“How long?” Bucky says.

“A day, maybe two. I’ve been here.” Steve doesn't look like he’s slept, unshaven, circles under his eyes like bruises.

“You should sleep,” Bucky says. “You look like shit.”

“My best friend nearly died.”

“You don’t say.”

Steve takes his hand - the human one - grips it like Bucky’s going to run off if he doesn’t keep him there.

“I’m not going anywhere. Promise. They even have me strapped in,” Bucky says, gesturing to the leather at his ankles meant to keep him still during surgeries.

They sit like that, for a long time, Bucky drifting in and out of consciousness. He wakes once, to find Steve asleep sitting up, face relaxed, if smudged with red clay, Bucky’s hand still in Steve’s grasp.

When he wakes again, it’s late, or at least the lamps have been dimmed. There’s a glass of something next to Steve - laudanum, perhaps, though Steve seems resistant to its effects.

His voice doesn’t slur - is steady - when he speaks.

“I killed three rebs,” Steve says. “Popped ‘em. One, two, three. Had to do it one-handed ‘cause I was carrying you with the other. Recoil nearly broke the bones in my wrist. One couldn’t have been more than seventeen. Barely shaving.”

“Do you -” Bucky says. “Do you regret -”

“God, Bucky, no. Don’t even ask me that,” Steve says, then, quieter. “Is this what it feels like all the time - killing?"

Bucky pauses, looks at the blank white paint of the ceiling. “Is it better to get used to it?”

“No, I suppose not.” Steve says. “Do you remember all of yours?”

“The ones I could see - yes. I remember. Most, no, it’s like watching a shadow play. Doesn’t seem real.”

“Feels pretty real right now,” Steve says.

“It’ll pass - or, it’ll get less acute. I don’t know if it ever goes away.”

“Not sure I’d want it to,” Steve says. “I keep seeing them. Their faces. Not after I shot them, just before. They were - they were surprised. Didn’t see the gun, I guess, or surprised I _could_ shoot at all.”

“Yeah,” Bucky says. “It’s easier. It gets easier. I’ll make it easier.”

“I can’t ask you to-”

“Don’t need to ask for something that’s given,” Bucky says.

Steve lets go of Bucky long enough to wipe his hand down his own face, stretches his jaw. Bucky hears it click. “They want me to lead a team. No, _I_ want to lead a team. Phillips finally OK’d it. I want you on it, if you’re willing.”

Bucky laughs, can’t help it, though it makes his chest throb. “Followed you this far,” he says, on Steve’s questioning look. "Might as well follow you a little farther.”

“And after?” Steve says.

“Anywhere, Steve. Didn’t know I needed to say it.”

Steve smiles broad, a little sad. He reaches for Bucky’s other hand, brings it to his mouth, kisses the metal fingers.

“Stay,” Bucky says, even though he doesn’t have to.

**Author's Note:**

> Warning for post-traumatic stress-related anxiety attack and canon character limb-loss. I'm willing to add any additional warnings as needed.


End file.
